I heard about Konfabulator a few years ago when it was super young (like 3.5 years ago or so) through a friend of mine. I thought it was cool, but (as I recall) it only worked on a mac (no windows version). Well, now that I’m getting OS X 10.4, and it has Dashboard (some call it a blatant rip off of Konfabulator), I thought I’d see if there was a windows version of konfabulator…there is.
So I installed it and grabbed some pretty cool widgets and am liking it quite a bit. My only gripe is that there is no ‘hide all widgets’ hot-key. I can, however make all the widgets only visible in the ‘Konspose’ mode by hitting ‘F8′ (very similar to what dashboard and expose does…creates a semi-transparent glass-pane over all your windows and displays all the widgets). The widgets I have are:
- SimpleCalc - Simple calculator…one text field, you just enter the math expression, hit enter and it solves
- Binary Widget - A binary clock…just for fun
- Blogliner - Tells me how many unread posts are in my bloglines account
- Stickies - Post It Notes…has a cool ‘dock’ feature that slides the notes off the screen when they lose focus (might defeat the purpose a bit…but looks neat).
- Word of the Day - displays word and definition
- miniIP - Tells your local AND public facing IP (for all you dynamic IP home - hosters)
- Free Memory - Displays how much physical memory is available
- Gas Watch - Tells you where the cheapest gas is for your zip code.
- MLB Ticker - Gives MLB scores (there are soccer ones too…no football)
- Memory Monitor - Shows a bar graph of memory used/free and tells you which app is the “Memory Hog”
-
Universal Shipment Tracker - Tracks packages from all the big shippers (I’m expecting some packages
).
- Where Is It - A simple search tool that will hit google and others
- Analog Clock - Simple analog clock
- The Weather - Tells you the weather in your city along with a representative graphic.
- What To Do - Simple todo list
- Tiger Timer - Tells you how many days until Tiger (OSX 10.4) is released.
There is another one called mini FTP that I’ll install and use at home (at work now) its pretty cool…you configure it with the ftp info and the widget is just a simple little icon that you drag files/folders to and it will ftp them to the server.
I really think it would be neat to have some developer-related widgets that would integrate in with your development tools…making a kind of developer dashboard. I can see widgets like a build manager, a cvs tracker, todo lists, test manager, deployment center, site/app monitors, log readers, doc reference/searches, others…
